About Me & This Journal

Hi, my name is David Morrison. I’m an American and. like most Americans, never traveled farther than Mexico for most of my life.

Then, in the summer of 2010, I went to China to see my friend Alex. We rode motorcycles all around Sichuan province for a month. (I kept a blog about that one on livejournal.) That really gave me the travel bug, and I saw, by Alex’s example, that it was possible to live abroad, if I became certified as an English teacher. So I quit my job, took the Cambridge CELTA, and moved to Europe.

This blog is about my adjustment to life outside the bubble of the USA, and a record of my wanderings in general. I like to document the little struggles, epiphanies, and peculiarities that come with diving into a new culture in one’s middle age. I like the minutiae, like when you open a can and find something that was not quite what you expected; the bus that seems like it should stop but doesn’t; the streets that change names without warning; the quirks of everyday language. I don’t write much about what you should see or do if you go to any particular place.

As of this writing, (Summer 2014), I have finished my second contract. I taught a year in Poland and a year in Kazakhstan. I’m currently staying with friends in Houston, Texas. I plan to spend the next year in the states, but I’m sure I will wander the globe again before too long.